Overview

Great Northern Collective Landscape Vision

A landscape that sustains its diverse natural systems to support healthy and connected populations of fish, wildlife, and plants; sustains traditional land uses and cultural history; and supports robust communities

The Great Northern LCC geographic area encompasses parts of the Cascade Mountains, the Columbia Basin, the Rocky Mountains, and the Sage Steppe of the Interior West.

The Partnership

The Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative (GNLCC) is one of 22 LCCs in an international network established by U.S. Department of the Interior to advance collaborative landscape conservation. Encompassing a binational North American landscape covering nearly 300 million acres, the GNLCC geography extends from interior British Columbia to southwest Wyoming.

The GNLCC partnership is network of U.S. federal, Canadian provincial and federal, Tribal Nations, state, academic, and conservation organizations. Working to achieve a collective landscape vision, the partnership implements a regional approach to address conservation issues across boundaries and jurisdictions by sharing data, science, and capacity.

Mission: To coordinate, facilitate, promote, and add value to large landscape conservation to build resource resilience in the face of climate change and other landscape-level stressors through the following:

Support Science Development

Effect Coordination

Inform Conservation Action

Monitor and Evaluate

Communicate and Educate

How We Are Organized

Leadership of the GNLCC is coordinated by two groups: the Steering Committee, which sets the vision, goals and priorities and the Advisory Team, which works with the GNLCC Coordinators to develop foundational information and provide recommendations to the Steering Committee. The Science Community develops and provides specific science needs and four Partner Forums help set priorities for or support on-the-ground landscape conservation.

The Partner Forums based on the GNLCC ecography, are facilitated by practitioners to identify science needs that will inform an adaptive management approach to on-the-ground application of landscape conservation.

How We Achieve a Collective Landscape Vision

To achieve a collective landscape vision, the GNLCC partnership implements guidance from four documents.

STRATEGIC CONSERVATION FRAMEWORK - Describes a collective landscape vision that is structured by an over-arching landscape integrity goal, four sub-goals, 31 conservation targets, and three stressors; and maps the interrelationships among conservation targets to allow partners working at all scales (local, regional, and national) to understand how their science and conservation efforts tier to GNLCC priorities and contribute toward the goals.

SCIENCE PLAN - Explains how to apply the Strategic Conservation Framework through an adaptive management approach and describes how the partnership intends to synthesize ecological science and conservation practice across spatial and ecological scales — from fine filter, species-specific conservation targets through coarse quantifications of landscape integrity — to derive repeatable measures of conservation outcome effectiveness.

COMMUNICATIONS AND OUTREACH STRATEGY - Describes four goals that aim to enhance collaborative landscape conservation and the objectives, audiences, and tactics / tools to reach those goals.

GOVERNANCE CHARTER - Provides the organizational structure and function of the partnership including purpose, goals, membership, and operations.

Our Guiding Principles

Work cooperatively and collaboratively to improve effectiveness of each organizations large scale landscape conservation programs and efforts

Conduct open and frequent communications within the GNLCC network, between related climate change and landscape programs, and among the expanded climate change and landscape conservation community

Consider and respect each participating organizations unique mandates and jurisdictions